Andrew Coyne: Lac Mégantic no safety crisis on Canada's rails, the only 'emergency' is runaway regulation

No doubt it was pure coincidence that Transport Canada issued a raft of “emergency” changes to rail safety regulations on the same day as the Commons Transport committee was scheduled to meet. Otherwise one might be tempted to conclude the only “emergency” was the political imperative of having something on the table before committee members sat down.

The committee itself was described as holding an “emergency” meeting, the emergency in this case being the urgent need for members of all parties to accuse each other of politicizing the issue, while arguing whether to hold hearings into an event that is already subject to no fewer than nine separate official investigations before any of them have reported back, or after.

But then, Transport Canada’s deliberations seem to have been no more informed by fact than the committee’s: as the agency concedes, “the cause of the accident in Lac-Mégantic remains unknown at this time.” Not only will the changes it has ordered do nothing to prevent an accident that has already happened, it cannot say with any confidence whether they would prevent another one like it.

Which is fine, because there isn’t going to be another one like it: a runaway train, derailing in the middle of a town, spilling substantially all of its dangerous cargo, which catches fire and explodes, killing dozens of people. As I’ve argued before, this is a unique event. Nothing like it has ever happened before. Nothing like it is ever likely to happen again.

There is no reason on the face of it to take such an outlier event as proof of a general crisis of safety on Canada’s rails, any more than we can find the causes of this specific event in whatever general concerns about regulatory oversight might have been raised in the past. Not only is there no evidence to connect the two, but the evidence is all in the other direction: rail safety, by every single indicator — accidents, derailments, fatalities, take your pick — has been steadily improving over the last decade.

But very well. We may not know precisely what caused the Lac-Mégantic disaster, but Transport Canada’s changes, most of them, are at least logically connected to a plausible explanation of what happened: had they been in place, they might well have prevented it. At the very least, they probably won’t hurt.

But let’s just review what an abundance of caution is involved. Of the six changes, four are directed to ensuring unattended trains are more tightly secured: ensuring brakes are properly applied; posting whatever special instructions are needed to apply them in the driver’s absence; removing the train’s directional controls, or “reversers,” as a failsafe; and, intriguingly, guarding against any “unauthorized entry into the cab.” A fifth would simply ban trains carrying dangerous goods from being left unattended.

But how much of a problem are runaway trains — of any kind, never mind the deadly megabomb variety? Transportation Safety Board statistics indicate they occur about 10 times a year, or about once every 10 million train-miles. A 10 mile stretch of track that sees about 1000 trains a year would experience such an event roughly once every 1000 years. That’s down about one-third in the last decade.

Large-scale derailments (more than 10 cars) are slightly more common: about once in 5 million train-miles. Fires and explosions occur with about the same frequency. TSB stats don’t show how many runaway trains end up derailing, rather than rolling harmlessly to a stop, or how many of these explode in flames, but the more unlikely events you add to the chain, the more the probability of the whole approaches zero.

But never mind: you can’t be too safe, right? Except when it comes to the sixth policy change, requiring at least two crew on all trains carrying dangerous goods. Not only is it unclear how a second crew would have helped in the present case, but Transport Canada would know that one-person or “driver-only” trains are not a safety issue generally. They might be, if all you did was subtract the second crew member. But that’s not what happened in Canada, nor in any of the other countries where one-person trains are common.

A 1997 “Study of One-Person Train Operations” commissioned by Transport Canada looked at the use of driver-only trains on public and private railways in a number of countries, including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the U.K. and New Zealand. Drivers were assisted by radio controls, supplemented by advanced signalling and speed-control technology. Drivers’ hours were strictly regulated; new drivers were required to undergo from 12 to 18 months’ training. Summing up, the study reported, “all the railways found the one-person safety record to be excellent and do not believe that two persons in the cab improves safety.”

After a minor accident involving a one-person train on Quebec North Shore & Labrador Railway — the only line, other than the ill-starred Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, so far approved to use them — Transport Canada attached more than a dozen similar conditions, including the installation of electronic proximity detection devices, an engineer performance record data system, increased training, supervision, and so on. There are other ways to build in a margin for safety, in other words, than hiring twice the crew.

And lurking beyond Transport Canada’s “emergency” regulations are others, much costlier and with even less justification: such as the NDP’s demands to replace every one of the thousands of the current DOT-111A tanker cars now in use, at a cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars, on grounds that they are too easily punctured.

Leave aside whether any car could have withstood a Lac-Mégantic style crash. How often do accidents involving the release of “dangerous goods” occur on Canada’s railroads? About three times a year on average: roughly once every 33 million train-miles. “Emergency”? Time to halt this runaway regulatory train.